Week 10 at the Pole

By Jean DeMerit, 17 Mar 2017 12:15 PM

Martin Wolf, IceCube/NSF

A tree grows at the South Pole. Well, not really. It’s not an actual tree (rather, a sculpture made of copper), and it’s definitely not growing. But it looks like a tree—great photo! With the sun getting so low, the temperatures have been rapidly decreasing at the Pole. And IceCube’s winterovers really started to feel it during a busy week with plenty of outdoor work. First, there were IceTop measurements, a regular maintenance task to determine snow accumulations around IceTop stations. There’s a large area to cover, so they generally travel around by vehicle, where they can return for breaks to warm up (image below shows them walking back to their LMC), but it’s still a lot of time spent walking around out in the cold. Second, they helped out another experiment in moving a very large mirror for a telescope out at MAPO. They were all bundled up—with fully frosted face masks—during that venture.